1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to television broadcasting and more specifically relates to broadcasting of sporting events.
2. Background Art
For many decades, television has been an important part of life in the United States, providing countless hours of news, movies, and various other forms of entertainment. Analog television has been the standard for many years, where local television stations broadcast signals in the UHF frequency band that are received by a television antenna on a television. The television includes a tuner that discriminates among the many television channels in the broadcast and displays a selected channel on the television screen.
More recently, digital television has gained popularity due to its higher resolution and better transmission quality. Small satellite dishes can now be used to receive digital satellite transmissions of television programs. DirectTV and Dish Network are two companies that provide digital television service via small satellite dishes. In addition, cable television companies now offer digital channels as well.
Watching sporting events on television has become a pastime and even an obsession for a large number of sport fans in the United States. Most live sporting events have time-outs, half-time, and other breaks that allows the broadcaster to broadcast commercials or comment by the network broadcasting crew. Thus, an NFL football game on Monday night may only have 60 minutes of playing time (four 15 minute quarters), but the actual broadcast may last three hours or more. Sometimes a fan may want to perform other tasks while watching the sporting event. For example, maybe a person needs to write checks to pay bills when the action in the game stops, but wants to watch the game when the action is going on. With current televisions, the user must either listen to the commentary and commercials between plays, or must manually mute the television volume between plays. The problem with this approach is that, after muting the sound, the user must visually look up to monitor the television picture from time to time to see if the game action has resumed to manually unmute the sound to continue watching the game as it is played.
Another problem with current television broadcasts of sporting events is the inability to automatically discriminate between play time and time that play is not occurring. As a result, when a sporting event is recorded for later viewing, the commentary and commercials are included because there is no way for the recorder to tell the difference between play action and time between plays. In addition, once the game with commentary and commercials is recorded, the viewer must then manually fast-forward through any parts where play is not occurring if the viewer only wants to watch the action portions of the game. Without a way for a user to alter the presentation or recording of a sporting event according to when play is actually occurring, users will continue to be frustrated by attempting to manually filter out unwanted pauses between play, and will have no way to view only specified portions of interest when replaying a recording of the sporting event.
According to the preferred embodiments, a television tuner and method monitor a scoreboard during a television sporting event and affect the viewing and/or recording of the sporting event according to information on the scoreboard. For example, the presentation of the sporting event may be affected according to the scoreboard by muting the volume or blanking the screen whenever the clock on the scoreboard is not running. In another example, the tuner and method control the recording of a television sporting event according to information on the scoreboard. A recorder could be paused whenever the clock is not running and resumed when the clock starts, thereby automatically skipping all commercials and all commentary when the clock is not running. In yet another example, the tuner and method control the presentation of a previously-recorded sporting event according to information on the scoreboard. A recorded sporting event could be filtered to display only the portions that contain a scoreboard the satisfied specified criteria. One specific example of this would allow viewing only the last two minutes of each half; viewing only the plays that resulted in a penalty; or viewing only the plays that resulted in a score. The preferred embodiments thus provide a tuner that alters the recording or presentation of a television sporting event according to information displayed on a scoreboard.
The foregoing and other features and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following more particular description of preferred embodiments of the invention, as illustrated in the accompanying drawings.